8 Challenges Undermining Your Marketing Team

Nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes your marketing department. Even if you’re confident that you have the best team in the industry, there are likely a few tweaks you wish you could make to push it higher.

Take your budget, for example. Who couldn’t use a few extra resources to test website copy? Or improve landing page design?

A lack of funding or resources is the number-one challenge undermining the potential of marketing teams, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel. This chart shows the top challenges that marketers feel undermine their department’s potential, according to research of more than 1,600 companies surveyed for the guide.

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See how these challenges are more common in larger organizations? That means as you grow, you are more likely to see new challenges rear their ugly little heads.

Dr. Charles Coker, author of the guide, notes that six out of eight of these challenges directly relate to personnel. The most common, though, is a lack of resources with roughly three-quarters of marketers experiencing it.

So how do you get more resources? You can’t pull cash out of a hat, but you can start a few pilot projects.

In short, a pilot is a small test. You take a small amount of resources and try something new, like optimization testing. You start small, work to prove ROI, and then show the potential and results to executives. If you can show that spending $1 will earn $3, then you’re likely to get it (see the ‘related resources’ below for more information).